Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Visiting Artist Lecture 2022

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz gives a lecture talking about her practice which mostly spans film and video. For Muñoz, a way in which she needs to and is attracted to the use of a camera as a social object is because of the ways that it provokes the possibilities of relations and third subjectivities that are not possible otherwise. Muñoz states how responding with and thinking to a place requires her to break up her own notions of thinking. Muñoz tells the participants of the awareness she has of her identity as a thoroughly colonized human being, and how this forces her not to trust what she sees as a neutral image, leading her to put obstacles in front of the ways in which she is trained to see. Muñoz also comes from thinking with the place of the Caribbean which requires her to experiment. This experimentation allows Muñoz to become interested in the living that occurs between the ocean and the shore, and how this occupies a space that is much more bigger and monstrous when one is so directly affected by the rise of the ocean or the hurricane. Muñoz continues her lecture by showing clips from her video and film work, explaining to the artists the ways in which she is interested in transformations that appear in our unconscious, and how she uses the process of the unconscious to explore displacement and condensation. Another theme that Muñoz shares with the participants is her relationship to debt; what one owes, how it dictates the possibility of future life, and how living outside of debt can lead to death or escape. Muñoz explores the theme of debt further, asking what it means to be completely excluded from even the conception of participating in an economy, and how not owning anything means that one doesn’t exist at all. Muñoz ends her lecture by stating that thinking about art making allows her to have an encounter with the world which can lead to improvising and how this improvisation can create a type of experience and alertness that the artist is ultimately interested in using for her film and video work.